WikiLeaks (22 page)

Böstrom was startled also to receive a phone call from Braun:

“I can hear from her voice that it’s something serious and she says, ‘It’s not true what I said [before], we
did
have sex.’ Then she goes on and says that the other woman – Katrin – had called her and told her that Julian had been there and had sex with her. On both occasions it was voluntary … Katrin told her that the next morning Julian continued to want to have sex with her without a condom. And she won’t, and protests, but Julian continues in spite of her protests.

“‘OK,’ I say, quite dumbfounded at suddenly having this conversation. Sonja goes on: ‘And I must tell you that we had sex at an earlier stage at my place and to my surprise during the act, he tears the condom … He has torn the condom and continues against my wishes.”

Böstrom adds: “I believe that Sonja is very, very credible, so I won’t discount it without speaking to Julian and confronting him with what this is all about – what the hell he thinks he’s playing at … They want Julian to take an Aids test otherwise they will report him, as they put it. They don’t want to speak to Julian themselves. So she goes off with Katrin and we speak on the phone a few times and text a bit and I call Julian a couple of times.”

Böstrom determinedly confronted Assange: “And his reaction is one of shock. He doesn’t understand it … [He says,] ‘Katrin didn’t object at all,’ and they had a ‘nice time’ … And I’m really trying to press him here – ‘Did you take the condom off, did you rip the condom?’ He doesn’t understand any of it … So there are two stories and I can’t draw any conclusions … Julian says that he doesn’t understand, and that they just had normal sex.” Told that Katrin claims to have protested about his lack of a condom, “Julian becomes angry a number of times, saying that they just had normal sex … ‘She did not [protest] … It’s lies, lies, lies!’” Assange later assures Böstrom that he has talked to Katrin and he thinks this is all an over-reaction. “But I tell Julian that if he takes a test they won’t report him – and if he doesn’t, they will.”

It is common ground that Assange at first refused to take an HIV test. Had he agreed, it seems unlikely that the subsequent legal dramas would have unfolded. Katrin’s younger brother says Assange had a conversation with his sister about it: “She asked Julian if he would get tested, and he said he didn’t have time.” Weiss was allegedly told that she would just have to take his word that he had no diseases. Assange’s lawyers dispute that. According to them, he said: “I can do a blood test but I don’t want to be blackmailed … I’d prefer to do it out of goodwill.”

Böstrom told the
Guardian
subsequently: “I was a kind of middleman – calling her, calling Julian. It went on for hours.” Late on the Friday afternoon, Assange finally agreed to take a test. But it was too late. The clinics had closed for the weekend.
Braun phoned Böstrom to say that they have been to the police, who say they cannot simply tell Assange to take a test. The police insist that their statements must be passed to the duty prosecutor, and a call was put out for the arrest of an accused foreigner, Julian Assange.

That night, the story about the allegations made against the man behind WikiLeaks leaked to the Swedish tabloid newspaper
Expressen
. Who leaked it? We don’t know. The prosecutor, who later got into trouble for confirming the allegation, says it was put to her by the newspaper, which had apparently been tipped off.

As a result of this hectic Friday, when the following morning dawned, Saturday 21 August, allegations that Assange was wanted by police for “rape” had begun to be sprayed all over the world. In the electronic global village, anyone can become famous within 15 minutes. Assange was in an unexpected predicament and his conviction that he had not “raped” anyone is perhaps understandable. But Assange’s new status as an international celebrity, as “the world’s most famous man”, was proving to be a cruelly double-edged sword. Journalists were demanding a reaction.

At 9.15am, he tweeted under the WikiLeaks name: “We were warned to expect ‘dirty tricks’. Now we have the first one.” The following morning, he tweeted: “Reminder: US intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks as far back as 2008.” In an interview, the Swedish tabloid
Aftonbladet
asked if he had had sex with his two accusers. He replied: “Their identities have been made anonymous so even I have no idea who they are.” He added: “We have been warned that the Pentagon, for example, is thinking of deploying dirty tricks to ruin us.” Yet Assange must have realised which two women had been threatening to report him to the police.

This line of attack proved unwise. He must have known his statements were, at best, highly misleading. His conspiracy theory of a Pentagon “honeytrap” gave a hostage to fortune and it also appears to have infuriated the two women. The Assange interview
in
Aftonbladet
was published on 22 August. When it appeared, Weiss’s friend Maria told police, “Katrin was upset by the fuss, and very angry with Julian.” Sonja, too, seemed exasperated, telling
Aftonbladet
: “The charges are of course not orchestrated either by the Pentagon or anyone else. The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who has a warped attitude to women, and a problem with taking ‘no’ for an answer.” She added: “He is not violent and I do not feel threatened by him.”

It took four months of stonewalling before Assange would accept in public that there was no evidence of a “honeytrap”. His lawyer, Mark Stephens, who had been using the phrase, had been misquoted, Assange would finally explain to the BBC’s
Today
programme on 21 December, and “that type of classic Russian, Moscow thing … is not probable”. While still claiming that “powerful interests” could have pushed along the smears, he did at last concede: “That doesn’t mean they got in there at the very beginning and fabricated them.”

What appeared to be Plan B came next: depict the women’s complaints as driven, if not by the CIA, then at least by a fit of man-hating. Once ensconced back in London, Assange spoke dolefully to contacts about the strong approach Swedish officialdom took to sex allegations: “Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of fundamentalist feminism,” he complained to friends. “One of the women has written many articles on taking revenge against men for infidelity, and is a notorious radical feminist,” he told the London
Times
. His lawyers stirred into this conspiracy mix some unsubstantiated hints of financial greed: “Text messages from them … speak of revenge and of the opportunity to make lots of money.”

Assange’s money allegations link significantly to the contents of one official witness statement from Weiss’s friend Maria, which may offer a more innocent explanation: “She remembered them
talking about going to [the rival tabloid]
Expressen
, because Julian had spoken to
Aftonbladet
himself. But this was just something they said, and had no intention of doing. Maria said Katrin had been contacted by an American newspaper and they had joked that she should get well paid.” None of them ever did, apparently, sell their story to anyone. In any case, these conversations came after the women had already been to the police.

Assange then shifted to what appeared to be Plan C. This was to characterise the complaining women as feather-brained types who “got into a tizzy” and were “bamboozled”: “The suggestion is they went to the police for advice and they did not want to make a complaint. What they say is that they found out they were mutual lovers of mine, and they had unprotected sex, and they got into a tizzy about whether there was a possibility of sexually transmitted diseases, and they went to the police to have a test … A ridiculous thing to go to the police about,” he told
Today
. “One of the witnesses, one of the friends of one of those women, she says that one of the women states that she was bamboozled into this by police and others. These women may be victims in this process.”

Swedish prosecutors were later to be criticised for a clumsy, or even sinister, handling of the case. A duty prosecutor ordered an arrest that same Friday night. Over the weekend, senior prosecutor Eva Finne, in Stockholm, withdrew the “rape” accusations involving both women, to be replaced on 24 August with an investigation into a less serious and non-arrestable charge equivalent to “sexual harassment”, confined solely to the case of Sonja Braun. On 30 August, therefore, 10 days after the storm broke, Assange voluntarily turned up for a formal interview with the police, to relive his short and ultimately calamitous spell as Braun’s house-guest.

Present were a detective, Mats Gehlin from the Klara police station family violence unit, and a lawyer.

Assange: Between the 13th and 14th August, I, as you put it, deliberately tore a condom during intercourse?

Police: How do you react to that?

Assange: It’s not true.

He agreed that something had been said at the time, the police account notes. “Sonja looked at the sheet and saw that it was wet and said, ‘Look at that,’ and Julian answered, ‘It must be you’ … Julian just thought she was pointing to it as an indication of how loving the sex had been although she spoke as if it came from him … Then they didn’t discuss it any more.” He accepted there was no more intercourse all week after that event “but there were other sexual acts”.

He told the interrogators that Braun only challenged him at the very end of the week he spent at her flat: “She accused me of various things… many of which were false … That I took the condom off during sex. It was the first I had heard of it.” Her friend Klara (not her real name) had also been in contact and Assange had been arranging to meet her on the following day to discuss what he had heard were “incredible lies” being told about him. He did not consider that Braun was planning to make any formal complaint and was “really surprised” to find she had been to a hospital and there was talk of DNA and the police. “I expected the whole thing to be over until I heard the news from
Expressen
.”

That might have been the end of the story. But the two aggrieved women appointed a high-profile lawyer on their own behalf, Claes Borgström, former Swedish equal opportunities ombudsman and prominent Social Democrat politician. He got both cases reopened, as law allowed, by appealing to a chief prosecutor (
överåklagare
), the sex crimes specialist Marianne Ny. He told a news agency the women didn’t even know it was possible to appeal a prosecutor’s decision until he so advised them. “I had read the police reports. I had seen my clients and heard their
stories,” Borgström said. “In my opinion, it was rape and attempted rape or sexual molestation.” He added: “We have better knowledge than other countries in the field of gender equality … That also means women don’t accept certain things in the same way they do in other countries.”

Not surprisingly, Assange was much dismayed. Facing a further interrogation about his unhappy one-night stand with the second woman, Katrin Weiss, he decided to leave town. He told friends he feared being arrested and paraded in front of a media circus. Subsequently, he circulated the idea that the resultant demand for his extradition was the result of covert pressure from the US government, who wanted to get their hands on him for the WikiLeaks exploits. No concrete evidence has yet surfaced to support this theory, although the US has threatened repeatedly that it will seek to bring its own indictment against Assange for information crimes. The claim certainly muddied the WikiLeaks waters, as conspiracy theories began to rage up and down the internet.

That summer, contemplating the imbroglio in Sweden from afar, the
Guardian
’s reporters in London were also dismayed. Leigh and Davies took a decision that it was nevertheless their duty to ensure the
Guardian
was steadfast – and indeed first – in reporting the facts. What happened in Stockholm may have been complex and equivocal, but some questionable sexual encounters had certainly occurred, and there was no evidence to support the claims of dirty tricks and honeytraps. The journalists were acutely aware that to ignore the fresh controversy that had erupted around their new collaborator could only increase the risk that it might taint the WikiLeaks enterprise as a whole.

Editor’s office, the
Guardian
, Kings Place, London
1 November 2010

“
I’m a combative person
”
J
ULIAN
A
SSANGE
, TED
CONFERENCE
, O
XFORD
, 2010

The three partner papers decided it was time for a meeting with Julian Assange. Everything was threatening to get rather messy. The embattled WikiLeaks founder now wanted the Americans frozen out of the much-delayed deal to publish the diplomatic cables jointly – a punishment, so it was said, for a recent profile of him, by the
New York Times
veteran London correspondent John F Burns. Assange had intensely disliked it.

The British were anxious about the fact that another copy of the cables had apparently fallen into the hands of Heather Brooke, a London-based American journalist and freedom of information activist. And the Germans were worried that things could get acrimonious all round unless the editors held a clear-the-air meeting with what was left of WikiLeaks.

There were at least three loose copies of the cables believed to be circulating now: with Brooke in the UK, Daniel Ellsberg – of Pentagon papers fame – in the US, and Smári McCarthy, an
Icelandic former WikiLeaks programmer who had, according to Assange, let a copy pass to Brooke. David Leigh had signalled to the
New York Times
he was willing personally to hand them a copy if Assange would not co-operate. But none of the huge secret cache of state department dispatches had yet actually been analysed and published to the world as originally planned. Would the whole audacious project end in tears?